The most important work we can do, individually and globally, is the healing of traumas so that we don’t pass them down to future generations. This blog is a working tool to contribute to this good work.

*Eleventh Thought

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A Shaman Daughter

Eleventh Thought

Sunday, June 22, 2008

I want to talk about the noise. Neuroscientists talk about the noise in our brain – a natural thing (find refs in prior work).

I believe in my brain the noise is far greater than in a normal brain. Right now, stress/distress amplifies and escalates this noise so that it nearly consumes me. A huge problem comes from my not being “socialized” to be a member of my species, which of course altered my brains functional and architectural properties, including my dis-abilities regarding language (hearing sound separate from words) and not being able to do the “normal” human chit-chat, meaningless conversation version of primate grooming behavior.

No surprise. No animal raised in isolation will ever be a normal member of its species, and we would be insane to believe that humans are any different.

Tied to this is the energy from unfinished trauma cycles that is trapped in my body. That amount of stuck energy, or energy recycling itself uselessly, I believe is adding to this noise. Not only is my brain noisy, but my entire body is.

I am also interested in understanding the connection between the “life force” and the information that exists from eastern understanding about kundalini. Is it the same thing as life force? And is it related to all this “stuck” energy from unfinished trauma cycles in my body?

Is this related to a “tap root” of the soul and spirit, through and in our body, to the world and to our lives? Is it related to what Fosha refers to as our innate ability to heal (knowing which way to right the crooked picture on the wall)?

If kundalini is the life force, and kundalini is considered a sexual energy and force, it would make sense that it be the energy of our fundamental and essential tap root. All our physiology and biology cares about is that we create children and grandchildren, and the social essence is about keeping ourselves alive long enough to do this, and then keeping them alive so that our species can endure.

ANYTHING else would be about having the luxury of having any excess, any amount of this energy left over. And what about those of us with massive amounts of unfinished trauma cycle energy within us?

(This is also connected to the fried hippocampal neurons that are not allowed by our physiology to store or process declarative, autobiographical memories of traumas that are of a completely overwhelming nature, and have no place in our line up of memories that facilitate our survival.)

++

Dissociation at those points in a trauma cycle where we froze and could not unthaw in effect are breaks in our energy spine. I remember arguing with the “expert” Bergstrom about my freeze response, and he belittled and criticized me saying that ONLY the fight or flight response mattered.

Bullshit.

It turns out that it’s the freeze response that takes over our lives like a cancer. Invading, pervasive, all consuming, destroying our ability to forge connections. We have to find our way around every one of these breaches, these frozen spots that sit there within us without hope of dissipation or resolution.

And then those of us with infant brains formed in chronic peritrauma don’t have the right brain left brain structures formed right in the first place, nor do we have correct operation between them, or correct communication. Our damaged corpus coliseum also has to take some credit for that.

So for us not only is this frozen energy stored within us, but we do not have the normal channels and structures and processes for handling ourselves in these stress-turned-distress situations – or do we? Do we have alternatives for surviving the regular people do not have? If so, what are they and how do they serve us?

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Monday, June 23, 2008

6:22 pm Time to put my morning thoughts into this computer.

++

I just returned Torro to ER’s shop. I believe I just walked out of that man’s life and he doesn’t even know it.

He’s my kryptonite and I just sealed him safely behind an iron wall. Similar to Swazye’s statement in Wung Foo, I no longer require nor desire his brand of affection. I do not trust him after last Friday’s display, to have my best interests at his heart.

After his display of no consideration for me, my needs, feels are a part of me, with friends like him who needs enemies?

He lost me and he’s “none the wiser for it” – he lacks the capacity to learn regarding women or he would have done it a long time ago. He’s not a heart breaker, he’s a relationship breaker – me? I just assumed the role as all others have done before me – (Mari is the long term, meets his “diaper” needs.)

I finally got mad, like when my kids were ever threatened, and it took a long time. I had to be able to experience Friday’s act clearly, so what contributed to clarity?

Nice vs mean. He’s changeable, there for me only if and when it suits him. So I call it “clear red Friday,” summer’s eve. He had a reverse-it window and if he’d called me on the weekend, I probably wouldn’t have myself so sealed away from him now.

I deplore how he treated me. How does deplore relate to the word hate. He crossed a line, and is now a stranger to me.

We probably have superior skill and superior assets when we cross our lines due to our dissociative capacities – we can disconnect and send the entire relationship/person (mind you, it’s taken me 7 or 8 years to write these words) into a bubble, like in superman, to the forgotten zone. Not to worry, these PD/PTSD people can do the same thing regarding us. We are all objects to each other, as hard as we might try to be and do otherwise.

We can package the whole thing up and send it sailing. I needed to be strong enough (to get unfrozen and able to make a change/different choice/try something new and different) which equals learning. So that I can separate out my attachment to him from my attachment needs themselves. Keep the needs, away/banish the man. When the cycle is finished, equals another “degree of freedom” equal something new learned.

Heat of anger moves one to the fight stance, perhaps the warmth of it is what thaws the freeze response. (even grief, thawed, unfrozen water)

As I move I leave the frozen/freeze stance. I’ve been frozen in this nasty situation for a long, long time. It will be probably a surprise to him if I can actually move out of this. Very unexpected. I think he thinks he can do anything and I will always be here/there.

Grief/sadness may be the equivalent of the tremble/release process in the trauma resolution cycle. I may yet face some, but I’ve grieved and hurt this entire time – 7 or 8 years.

Maybe I tapped the season change power, as I did the eclipse with ending my feelings with Mel. It was a breaking point.

It’s probably not the willingness to change/get out of a relationship. It’s the ability to do so, having the strength and resources, and/or access to them. Reserve: tapped into the season change, I have no reserves of my own.

Spit on the wet stone once you’re over the hill and create a new person, as per my dream in Sioux Falls.

Last night, though I don’t remember the details, I dreamed of 7 transformations. Maybe my 7 years with him, each old self with a power and ability was killed and absorbed and disappeared into the conqueror, who then became the next one conquered until 7 was completed. Each too the powers and then was itself killed, eaten and absorbed by another. Seems the powers were in pairs, or 2 sided ones, perhaps the weaknesses with the strengths?

I know that John’s help and SSI for now has helped, gaining the resources (degrees of freedom) to be able to pay the rent.

So degrees of freedom are in relationship with degrees of power (can’t fight w/o resources)

Yet even if/when I had $$ in these past years I could not free myself from ER, from the intensity of the feelings. But I needed it NOW to get over this hill.

We learn words and then we learn phrases, like super trauma, and degrees of freedom and completing the trauma cycle.

I probably reached a point of NEGATIVE GAIN with ER. Is this the equivalent of an infant’s “impossible situation” as Schore refers to it?

++

When all reserves and resources have been consumed and the body begins to feed upon itself = danger zone, dangerous place or situation.

He crossed the line, my line. “You don’t get another chance to disrespect, humiliate, disregard and under appreciate me. I am cloaked, armored and protected. I have dropped off of your radar screen. I am flying stealth. I have made myself invisible to you. I am whole and complete with the resources available to me. You are no longer wanted in my life. I have removed myself from your existence. Your loss. My gain.”

Our entire life from conception through our bodily death is a shaman’s journey. We are all shamans, people of the Medicine Way, no matter what our journey takes us through. The ancients knew this. Trace back through our ancestral roots and back before the 50 – 70,000 year-ago journey that our human race has taken out of Africa, and perhaps that’s what we have most accomplished. The gaining of our powers as Homo Sapien Sapiens, the Wise Ones, and now the losing of them.

Perhaps we laid them down along side our pathway, freeing our hands and ourselves to grab other things like a crow grabs a piece of crinkled tinsel. Where are all of our shamanic gifts? Because that is what they’ve always been, gifts given to us like rare and precious talents. Gifts that allowed our species to survive and thrive. And the risk is if we don’t go back and recover, pick these gifts back up, we will destroy ourselves, annihilate ourselves so that we as a species cease to exist. “Cease and desist from existing on earth.”

++

Though we cannot access normal happy or well being, we can aim in that direction toward the center point of calm and balanced equilibrium, calmness, contentment. We can aim for a lessening of the fear, terror, grief and rage.

++

This is a rupture without much hope of repair. Maybe because our brains formed under impossible conditions it’s hard to distinguish between what is possible and what is not.

ER called this morning supposedly because he was concerned about me. I say hogwash (strange expression), where was his concern for me last Friday, or over the weekend? Only care when it’s convenient, huh? No longer works for me. No excuses, no compromise, no repair.

Is evolution an “always striving for more degrees of freedom?

What enters here is the concept of hope, related to Schore’s description of the onset of the shame reaction in the nervous system, parasympathetic and sympathetic. In here somewhere we get stuck and dissociation sets in. So even from the beginning, shame experience is a trauma. It sometimes can be repaired…

Fighting back against shame. Depression of the “go” system, again, what we can count on based on what we hoped for/expected, what has happened in the past, coping skills that worked in the past…Shame, a crash of the nervous system – like I did last Friday, only it came as rage.

Finally, I’m not letting him off the hook, like John’s story of his friend river fishing in Illinois, who was all excited thinking he had a big fish on the line as he worked it in, only to lift his line out of the water and see a giant water moccasin thrashing there, staring him in the eyes, twisting and snapping, angry as hell.

“You cut the line and saved your rod?” John asked him. “Hell no! That snake was after me. My life is worth more than that rod. I let go and ran like hell.”

++

No more get out of jail free cards, he’s used all his wild cards. He was mean to me and he didn’t even know it. He’d justify it like my mother did. Suddenly there was no more Mr. Nice Guy, and like the snake on the end of that line, I never saw it coming. Straw that broke the camel’s back, he was a brutal bully to me last Friday – in my book, coming as his reaction did out of nowhere (to me). And that he didn’t give a shit how it affected me.. I am STILL pissed.

Is it the river’s fault that sometimes you catch good eating fish and sometimes you hook deadly snakes? When a person gets enough of those snakes, I guess they’ll quit fishing the river.

++

He acted like a predator, and this prey got mad. Let him prey somewhere else. I suspect that the trusting adoring Linda that couldn’t wait to go see him over there is dead dead dead. I think he killed her. Butchered. Sacrificed. Slayed. House dropped on her head dead. I hope he enjoyed his little power control dominance maneuver last Friday. Not that I mean that much to him anyway, but he sacrificed me. For what? His ego?

++++

Tuesday, June 24, 2008

This morning’s thoughts:

On my side of the fence there’s the PTSD integration problem. Once I am in my defensive place regarding ER, I doubt there’s anything left. It’s black & white: inclusive vs exclusive.

I’ve absolutely had him included in my inner Linda circle. I think he’s awful close to being excommunicated from my inner sanctum. I don’t know how to moderate him as a threat – which he was last Friday. He’s been that hundreds of times before (but never this clearly to me before) – but not for a long time. I trusted him. I was unprepared for what happened and taken by surprise.

My trust of him and sense of safety and security were seriously threatened. (Again, like my mother, when the attachment figure who is supposed to be a part of your safe haven attacks and preys upon you). This “state shift” was drastic and to me, brutal. There was no preparation for this transition from “Gee, I get to spend some sweet time visiting with him before the weekend” to his (my words) “Get the hell our of my shop, my main woman’s coming.”

I am trying to understand my process over this Friday 6-20-08 equinox eve event. Shock from being blind sided like a mean bully man put on (like in MiB) the ER skin suit. I walked in with trust and openness, thrilled to see him, excited about a visit – with hope and expectation (and as I add later, I cared), also with a sense of trust in him wanting to see me – to me that was MY known.

My known was abruptly shattered. What I expected, was prepared for was brutally altered (though I don’t handle stressful transitions well of any kind) – His (to me) rude insensitivity, lack of caring, compassion or concern, amplified the shock.

Actually, though, he did set the whole thing up, like staging a play. Some part of him knew perfectly well what was going to happen to me, and in a sadistic way he looked forward to it, and he enjoyed it. He could have called me well before the time I got off work to tell me the situation. But instead he had just called me and told me his doctor’s appointment was cancelled and that he would be at the shop when I got there. I thought at the time that this was a nice gesture, though it did puzzle me somewhat. But it was his way of sinking his teeth in, of pulling me into the play, of setting me up for the role I was to play in his afternoon’s drama.

Somehow it’s important and significant that I experienced the even as a shock to my entire system. It was like cruising down the interstate at 75 mph and he dropped a building right in front of me., or like being thrown into reverse from full speed ahead (it would shock anyone, I suppose). All gears are locked, frozen. I had no resources that allowed me flexibility or degrees of freedom or choice in how I was going to react. I reacted. A trauma drama set up.

Like pulling the line out of the river expecting a delicious fish for dinner and there’s that raging monster water moccasin thrashing on the hook instead.

When there’s a shock in the environment around me, a threatening contrast between hope, the known and the expected and anticipated, and the opposite happens, there’s no way to transition. It is exactly how Schore describes the shame reaction.

For every rupture, when there is repair, that involves a process of some sort. It must normally happen so fast (when we have abilities to be flexible and can cope) we don’t have to pay attention to this process. It is automatic.

I guess I am still trying to accomplish that transition. There’s much to be learned in this process. I am STILL angry!

Dissociation is like when no action IS the only action IS the reaction.

There’s incongruity in the situation between our inner preparedness for what we are anticipating/expecting to happen and what actually does happen – without transition.

This is NOT like driving a car and “spacing out.” There’s a very real physiological process going on – highly stressful to the body (and in our case becomes highly distressful) – engine is roaring with the brakes on.

Total suppression/shut down to conserve energy is different than a seeming shut down = freeze.

(pain goes away so you won’t tend to wounds – hyper frozen? Hypo frozen? I need to be able to distinguish between the 2. Is it “prepared to take action” freeze or “prepared to take no action” freeze?

(I read the Time magazine story on the war and Prozac and have the copy)

There’s a trigger = a shocking disturbance/change/alteration. Something we are most literally not prepared for at the time it happens.

They say of dissociation that it’s about being “numb,” “in a zone,” or as Bergstrom put it, “being in la la land.” Nobody will stay there permanently, but PTSD seems to be about never quite making it all the way through the cycle, either. Never letting the body finish.

(alter/change vs alert)

It’s a safe and secure place, perhaps, this frozen place, the best that we have, maybe becomes the best that we can hope for. At that time, we are all that exists in our world, us and the predator/threat, we are totally in the “body of one” (the individual is truly alone and must provide their own safe haven, security, safety). When one is in shock, one is alone, not part of the group – and certainly is without the protection and help of the group (is shame less of a power in cultures where the infant is not reacting to a single caregiver, but rather a group of caregivers?)

Will another species ever come to the aid of a different one other than their own?

(Studying dissociation from the inside with insights from the outside)

Schore describes the “face away” of the shame reaction, and I told ER yesterday that I felt humiliated. I do not want to face him. I don’t want to see him or talk to him. Maybe shame can be a life saving sort of option – a good thing – facilitating escape from something that is hurtful to us. I think I have a conditioned response (finally) to avoid him and his environment. I doubt he has the capacity to understand why even if I did try to tell him. His one-man show on Friday needed me to be on stage as the victim. Shit on that role!

Implode vs explode point

Suspension/suspension

All gears locked?

Takes its toll

Consumes reserves, left to its own resources – and the infant has few.

++

What does this have to do with caring? Giving a damn? Hope is hope only because of something we care about, or why bother? Hope and caring are both about something we have an investment in, a vested interest in. I have always been “at risk” with ER because I cared. Kill the care part, maybe there’s nothing left.

Maybe care about him, but don’t care if I see him or not?

Assessing risk – as degrees of caring (and investment)

What about forgiveness?

How is caring tied to empathy and conscience – and need? (compassion?) I would think there has to be a self separate from the other for any of this to be operational.

But then we also have a soul – that may or may not have been allowed to “grown down” into our body and the world. Can it still care even when there is no clear or healthy self?

Read that Eskimo book again, Linda

++

Super trauma

Essential trauma

++ learning and kindling and CNS “depression and dissociation

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His actions toward me were manipulative and sadistic Friday. How could he have cared that it distressed me? He intended that it would, and he got what he wanted.

If you want to be sure your fireworks don’t work, don’t put any gunpowder in them. He packed that situation to make sure it would go off, like a land mine. And then he led me into it and I came, yes, totally unsuspecting. He set up that trap, visiting him being my lure, picking up Torro, poor thing, who was actually the bait.

++

Yup, the Linda that gives a damn about seeing ER is at best MIA. What’s the moral of this story? Never trust a sadist not to hurt you. According to my readings on Narcissistic Personality Disorder, they ARE sadists, as hard a pill as that might be to swallow.

I know I’ve seen a real man in there sometimes, lots of times. Vulnerable, open. But I cannot trust that man to be there, obviously, all of the time. And not only is HE MIA at times, but the active sadist is present, as he was last Friday. I think I need to read Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde. I never have, but I am beginning to think there has to be something archetypal – and therefore very important – in that story.

++

Common among a species, common ground, the common good, a common sense. Things shared and understood jointly. It is not supposed to be a common thing not to have all your needs met as an infant/child. Humans evolved by having these needs met, and the evolution, the needs, the entire process is built into us. We contain it. We are it.

How do things change in our species when there’s nearly 7 billion of us now? Does that make our children less of a vital resource? Less of a valued and valuable asset? Does it lead now to the uncommon becoming more common – adults not meeting the needs of infants and children?

Is it possible that this altered, primitive brain that our malevolent environments created in us become more common, more normal? How does it interact with our genetics, our DNA – mutations?

Three are consequences. What happens when global situations come home to roost like the buzzards do in the Bisbee buzzard tree? We are not inoculated from the effects of these changes. Don’t meet ALL an infant’s evolutionary needs and you won’t get a common human, a common member of the species. Not a common brain structure, not a common immune system or a common nervous system. You will get alterations. Are we prepared for these?

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Trauma dramas, trauma reenactments. ER’s pawns must be about his mother, grandmother – who wanted him, who didn’t, who had him, who didn’t, who should have cared and fought for him and didn’t. Not my story…

++

I’m preparing the frog fabric to cut out the frogs, and I have to be very careful of the ones right on the edge to save them. The ones in the middle are safe, but not the edge ones – just a metaphorical notation!

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Wednesday, June 25, 2008

I am avoiding writing here today. I have notes from earlier, and the letter I mailed ER to enter here. I am going to eat my dinner and finish watching Flash Dance, then I need to do this. Some sort of discipline….

++

First, I want to say that this is hard for me, like I am getting closer to some sort of truth, digging through the trash in the closet and my fingers brush against the skeleton in there. Who wouldn’t want to run in the other direction as fast as they could go?

I have a Time magazine article here with a picture of the Dali Lama walking down a pathway, open and standing here beside my computer. I think of what Cindy said he said when asked, that victims of severe infant abuse do not have the same chance others do to reach enlightenment in this lifetime – though she doesn’t now remember where she read that, but I asked her to try to find it in her head somewhere so I can read it too.

When a person looks into a mirror and there’s nobody looking back, that’s a terrifying thing. I’m afraid of that. I’m afraid that I now have lost the Linda that trusted ER, for without that trust I feel like I severed him from my existence, like I put the memory of him somewhere else, like a lost thing, but I don’t want to look for it either because I know the potential for that sadness.

I haven’t called him all week. This is the letter I wrote to him when I was at work today and mailed:

Dear ER –

I miss the kind ER. I do not miss the sadistic one. As far as I can tell I am the only one that suffers in this situation. When you called me Friday and told me your doctor’s appointment had been cancelled so you would be at the shop when I came to get the dog, I of course thought it was nice of you to call and I looked forward all day to being able to see you for awhile – especially because it was Friday and I always miss you over the weekends.

No I know I was set up for what happened once I got to the shop and the land mine went off. You knew all day she was bringing that motor to you (something I used to love to do for you in the past that has also been taken away from me). You easily could have called me and let me know what the situation was going to be before I got there so I wouldn’t have been blind sided and hit in the face with you telling me to leave the shop “right now” – said with NO feeling, compassion or consideration as you turned your back to me and walked away. Not only did you not empathize that these circumstances upset me, you blamed me for having any feelings at all and then made fun of me.

You could have showed some concern for me by calling Friday later – or Saturday.

So you suddenly are concerned about my well being on Monday? After you set that trap up for me on Friday and sadistically enjoyed hurting, shocking, stunning me?

I suppose I could be sarcastic and say you could write down on a calendar so I’d know ahead of time what time of what days of the week I might be able to depend on the nice ER caring about my well being.

But I wouldn’t even be able to trust that. You have genuinely (I thought) appreciated seeing me and been sweet and kind to me for weeks. I had no reason not to trust you when I walked into that shop last Friday. But there was the cold, harsh, brutal, uncaring sadistic ER. I could not adjust to that switch and that shock.

So you tell me, is there any reason for me NOT to still be upset?

Linda

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I guess I can go backward now to my first writing of today, though I would like to make sure and note here that the word “switch” is very important. A switch implies a shock to me because there is no transitional opportunity. It is also important to remember that not only do I have an altered set point for equilibrium that does not include a center balance pint at calm, but that this also means that my switch in my nervous system between parasympathetic and sympathetic is off. I have that reference in my earlier writings from the research.

++

this morning before I left for work:

The shame head-turning-away must be a version of avoidance – an avoidant reaction that is in the body, NS, brain and burgeoning mind of an infant. (I am avoiding ER. I don’t want to see him or to talk to him.)

Because there’s no hope of anything better. He has a bully inside of him like something alien, a monster (like my mother had – Joyce gave me an insight later in the day that applies to this) and I never know when it will come out. I can’t trust him. Hope and shame are intimately tied together and connected in the ANS, also with freeze and dissociation. (That’s what I told him on Monday, that Friday I felt humiliated – Schore talks about the difference in age onset and capacity for shame vs humiliation, also in my earlier writings).

I don’t remember writing this part, no idea what I was referring to: word/concept/fact matching game helps us to get it right. Then we win, like a matching of a line of lemons or limes at the slot machines. We want the jackpot and we PTSD sufferers need one.

I guess I was writing about my writing, wanting to get the clarity to get this all right.

Drawing lines in the beach sand as the tide is coming in wave upon wave. Where/when does the infant become the child become the adult? These lines are as insignificant as those drawn in that sand because we are put together as one being, all are us now. It’s how we get made.

++

Trauma reenactments, time is arbitrary anyway, so the past IS the present, person orchestrating the drama, the producer, is like a possessed zombie in a time warp, truly, “they know now what they do.” Usually those filling the available roles are equally unaware. All is a manifestation of the unconscious in that we are not conscious of what we are doing. I was able to snap out of it Friday after that experience, eyes open somehow, as hard as it is to admit. I recognized the threat, I think because of my work last week on identifying the lack of identity/self reality that sets people like me up to be the dance partners of PD people.

The reason why he couldn’t care that he hurt me Friday was because it wasn’t written into the trauma drama reenactment script. What good does it do in a Tombstone style reenactment of a staged gunfight only with real bullets, when one has to stop after firing at someone and ask, “Gee, did that hurt? I am so sorry I shot you.”

Getting caught up, swept up into one of these reenactments is like being a rolling wheel that can’t be stopped. At least if there was a flat spot on the wheel, maybe it could stop. Maybe my thinking about me and PD role potential created a flat spot so that the wheel has stopped. I am mad and not calling ER. I need clarity. I don’t really know what happened Friday!

++++

Friday, when ER got to pull the pin out of the grenade he was standing there waiting for me with, I was put into a totally chaotic spot. When I described the situation to Sharon at work today she couldn’t believe that I still took the dog. Hers would have been a normal reaction, not to take the dog. But when I was confronted with this unexpected situation and with this brutal ER instead of the nice one I was expecting, I dissociated, and again, this is not the cruising to work in a daze, this was like being in the middle of an explosion, a cyclone, a tornado, a hurricane and an earthquake all at the same time.

At that instant it was like the world spun, I lost my bearings – it is the disorganized, disoriented state they see in infants but seem to refuse to acknowledge continues to exist in adults. It’s a terrifying place, and I don’t know how I have made it through all of them that must have happened in my life. I must have dissociated from the dissociations, “That didn’t just happen.” One has to continue doing something. When in conversation, the blank look would be on my face. But ER was a moving target, walking away from me as he dropped his bomb after he turned his back to me. I HATE it when he does that to me any time he does it, but he hasn’t done it to me in a long time. Shut me out completely.

The paradox is that the disorganized/disoriented state of chaos, where all options are possible and there’s no way to prioritize or find an appropriate response (like don’t take the dog), comes from the literally impossible state I was constantly faced with from birth, to survive an impossible situation. Then I had no possible option, no coping abilities or skills, and there was nothing I could do. This is so far past the helpless situation that experts recognize that I’m not sure it can be compared.

When this happens to me now, it is no more possible for me to find a response than it was when my brain was forming and there WAS no response possible. Hard to explain, this paradox, but I was in that chaos place on Friday. They are to be avoided – from my new point of view – at all costs. It has to do with fundamental issues of control over the environment and ourselves in it, our part of it being competence or not.

Friday I had no capacity to react normally and my vulnerability to risk is what makes me maddest about the whole situation. That’s the honesty of it.

++

We have anger for a reason. It’s a life preserving/enhancing physical condition in the NS that alerts us to the fact that there’s a danger, there’s something wrong and survival has our attention big time. Same thing with sorrow, grief and sadness. We are NOT machines, no matter what our government and military believes as they medicate 200,000 of our in-arena troops.

What Joyce calls her dark angel, she describes as “not her” and as extremely destructive. I might call it the Destroyer, like the Hindu goddess Shiva. I don’t know yet how this is connected to rage, if there is a continuum there, but this is a murderous rage Joyce is talking about, and maybe is the Butcher that was in my mother and that I saw in ER, even if it is a butcherer of souls.

I was talking to Ramona about betrayal, that I have earlier identified that betrayal is central when a person gets partly formed and then is betrayed and I think PD develop. Is the destroyer our primal, primary, primitive animal nature rearing up? And does it differ from an animal’s in that it can be summoned when a person is betrayed as that is an injury to the soul self?